Twenty-eight-year veteran KPD Officer Shelley Clemons never intended to stay in Knoxville. 

When she came here from Houston in 1989 to finish her education at Knoxville College, Clemons’ goal was to get her diploma and move to a city where she could fully utilize her talents for fashion design and illustration. 

But Clemons excels at many things -- maybe everything she tries. And multi-talented people have a way of getting involved in the community. 

Her entry into public safety and law enforcement was a campus security job she took to help pay her college tuition. 

KPD Sgt. Nate Allen, who oversaw Knoxville College security at the time (and in 2014 was named the City's first Black Deputy Chief), recruited Clemons to join the City’s police force. 

Her experience working security at Knoxville College and at Austin-East High School made the job opportunity make sense. College and high-school campuses are like little cities, she says. 

But the main draw, she said, was that KPD offered tuition reimbursement, a benefit that would facilitate her finishing her degree at Knoxville College, a historically black college/university (HBCU) that offered a kind of community she'd never experienced before growing up in Clinton, Iowa. 

However, after Clemons finished her first year as an officer and had time to take a breath and have a “woosah” moment, Knoxville College had lost its accreditation and was closed. 

Life, and remarkable careers, happen while you’re busy doing other things. A lot of other things. 

She married co-academy member Lynn Clemons, and they had two sons. She began as a patrol officer, then a bike officer in downtown and the adjoining neighborhoods, and then joined the Safety Education Unit and taught DARE in elementary schools. She joined the unit investigating domestic abuse, child abuse and missing persons. 

“It takes a toll working those cases,” she says. 

After 10 years, she had the opportunity to become the Community Outreach Coordinator. 

In that role, Clemons is heavily involved in representing KPD and public safety at many tables, including Civil Rights Working Group, KPD Training Academy, FBI Citizens Academy, HBCU advisory board, a member of the United Way’s Community Healing Fund team, University of Tennessee’s Office of Diversity and Community Relations led by former City of Knoxville PARC Executive Director Clarence Vaughn. 

She provides feedback and support about community engagement to officers in other roles. 

KPD officers are required four hours of community service per year, and Clemons signed up to help SEEED Knox construct their first affordable solar house, located in the Lonsdale neighborhood. 


She says that when she’s not in meetings, her favorite place is to be connecting with young people. As a school-based mentor with the Big Brothers Big Sisters of East Tennessee, Clemons regularly visits her mentee at Spring Hill Elementary, where she is recognized and welcomed by teachers and students. She and her mentee talk about anything and everything, from what the young woman is learning in class to how she feels about violence in the community that has directly affected her own family. 

“I support her having good days and bad days,” Clemons says. Their relationship goes beyond the uniform and Clemons’ role as a police officer. “She sees me as me.” 


Creating and sustaining that connection of trust -- both as an individual and within the community -- is important to Clemons.

“I want to be that resource in the community," she says. She sees opportunity for the entire KPD force to strengthen those connections to increase trust and reduce violence in neighborhoods across the city, especially through the kinds of recruiting that brought her to KPD. 

Her class -- the Class of 1994-B -- had eight African American officers. She hopes to see that kind of diversity in future classes. 

And now that Knoxville College is once again enrolling students, she's looking to add one more accolade to her roster: college graduate.